[Marxism] re Sweezy

[farmelantj at juno.com]

The issue becomes a bit complicated when
one reflects on the fact that while Keynes,
by his own admission, never read much Marx,
he was surrounded by (and indeed surrounded
himself with) people who most certainly knew 
their Marx (i.e. Sraffa, Robinson, Kalecki),
and of course Maurice Dobb was at Cambridge too.
So I think that indirectly, Keynes was influenced by Marxism,
although Keynes was certainly no socialist.
If Keynes was, as many people have thought,
one of the foremost, if not the foremost bourgeois
economist of the 20th century, then it would
certainly have behooved an economist like Sweezy
to make a careful study of his work and see what
could be incorporated into Marxism, much as Marx
had done with the work of Smith and Ricardo.
Presumably, in the process, Sweezy would have have
found himself critiquing Keynesian ideas, and 
reformulating them in new ways, much as Marx had
done with many of Ricardo's ideas, since as a
Marxist one would reject the assumption that
capitalism was grounded in the requirements of an
unchanging human nature which Keynes embraced.

That is certainly not a denigration of Sweezy's
work IMO, although as I noted before, it has
been a source of controversy among Marxists, and people
like Mattick, Linder, and James Heartfield have all
taken him to task for it, but then what else is
new?

Jim F.

-- "Michael Friedman" <mikedf at amnh.org> wrote:

With all due respect to Dick Levins (who has been an inspiration to me), I
would say it depends on whether or not the "part" has an organic
connection to the whole. To use an analogy from another ongoing discussion
on this list, simply because working class people pick up xenophobic and
racist ideologies does not give them "new properties". Or another, if I
transplant a pig's heart into a human, it won't become a human heart, nor
will the "whole" human function properly. And the idea of a "whole" is,
itself, relative and conditional. The whole working class? The whole
capitalist system? Just because Sweezy was a Marxist, doesn't transform
his Keynesian "part" into Marxism. Doesn't make him less of one, but he
could've been wrong, you know...


> Message: 3
> Date: Sun, 01 Feb 2009 21:20:21 -0430
> From: "michael a. lebowitz" <mlebowit at sfu.ca>
> Subject: [Marxism] re Sweezy
> To: marx <marxism at lists.econ.utah.edu>
> Message-ID: <4986515D.9010405 at sfu.ca>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
>
> because he drew upon some of Ricardo's insights. What some who view
> themselves as untainted by Keynes and thus the only true Marxists may
> not understand is the basic principle of a dialectical worldview that
> [in the words of listmember Richard Levins] 'parts acquire properties by
> virtue of being parts of a particular whole, properties they do not have
> in isolation or as parts of another whole.' So, the question is what was
> the whole in which those parts were situated. As for Kalecki's
> influence, that came later--- but both he and Sweezy were influenced by
> Rosa Luxembourg [and the former's obscure essays working through the 2
> Dept model in the 30s preceded Keynes and, in my view, were superior].
>             michael.
>
> --
> Michael A. Lebowitz
> Professor Emeritus
> Economics Department
> Simon Fraser University
> Burnaby, B.C., Canada V5A 1S6
>
> Director, Programme in 'Transformative Practice and Human Development'
> Centro Internacional Miranda, P.H.
> Residencias Anauco Suites, Parque Central, final Av. Bolivar
> Caracas, Venezuela
> fax: 0212 5768274/0212 5777231
> www.centrointernacionalmiranda.gob.ve
> mlebowit at sfu.ca



-- 
Michael Friedman
Ph.D. in Biology
City University of New York

Sackler Institute for Comparative Genomics
American Museum of Natural History
79th Street and Central Park West
New York, NY 10024
Office: 212-313-8721
Cell: 718-812-4246
Alternative e-mail: lycophidion at gmail.com


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